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John Rawls Introduction

Course video 39 of 78

This module looks at classical formulations of the Social Contract Tradition, locating them in historical context, but then shifts to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today.

When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.

Impartido por:

Ian Shapiro
Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director

Transcripción

But let me talk a little bit about the man himself before we get into this.

He was in many ways an unlikely figure.

At least two I want to draw attention to here.

For one is that, by the time Rawls came along in the 1960's, doing

political philosophy in the spirit of the grand tradition had fallen out of favor.

And what I mean by the spirit of the grand tradition is, theorizing the way Locke

did or the way Mill did or the way Hobbes did about how society should be organized.

What I would call first order normative theorizing about

the grounds of human association.

It had fallen out of favor and it had fallen out of favor which should, for

reasons that should be pretty obvious to you by now in this course.

There were basically three possibilities.

There was Utilitarianism, there was Marxism,

and there was the classical Social Contract.

And they were all seen at some deep level, some non-fixable level, to be hopeless.

So, let's just recap a little bit here.

What were the two big variants of Utilitarianism that we talked about?

>> Classical and-- >> Yeah.

>> Neo-classical.

>> And how did they differ?

Well, classical utilitarians, Utilitarianism, it allowed

the interpersonal comparison, which is a very strong idea and a strong theory.

>> Yeah. >> That allows lots of space for

problems like elimination of the Jews,

as you could see during the Second World War for instance.

An Eichmann problem.

And then the neoclassical did not allow

interpersonal comparison which, again, now it's too weak.

>> Okay. And so I think that's exactly right.

Classical Utilitarianism allows the using of some for the benefit of others.

In that sense violates exactly the categorical imperative

that Kant was talking about.

That is to say, if exterm-, in the limiting case,

we talked about philosopher's examples like the utility monster and so on.

But in the limiting case, allowing people to die, or perhaps even killing them,

if that promotes the general utility.

We saw that classical utilitarianism didn't have any brake on that.

Didn't have any way of stopping that.

And Rawls, in his critique of classical Utilitarianism,

says the trouble with classical Utilitarianism,

is that it doesn't take seriously the differences between persons, right?

It doesn't take seriously the difference between anybody.

Because it's only interested in maximizing the utility in the society and

it doesn't matter who actually experiences the utility.

And so, you can get all of these morally horrendous consequences out of it.

The problem with neoclassical Utilitarianism is

it's almost the opposite problem, that is.

It takes the differences between persons so

seriously that you can't make any moral judgments.

Even if it means that not doing tiny amounts of

redistributions from the wealthy to the poor is gonna leave the poor to die,

we say, well we can't make interpersonal judgments, sorry.

So classical seems too strong, neoclassical seems too weak, for

most people's moral intuitions.

And for hundreds of years, different proponents of different variants

attacked one another mainly by pointing to the deficiencies of the other one's view.

But both of them had these big deficiencies, and

it was sort of a long-term standoff.

And by the 1960's, I think most people thought it was pretty much hopeless.

What about Marxism?

>> Well, there are a couple things.

I think, first of all, many of its predictions were off.

For instance the prediction that socialism would follow,

social revolutions would follow advanced capitalistic societies,

just didn't happen, or it's not the way it happened.

>> Yep. >> Also,

problems with the labor theory of value didn't hold a lot of water.

>> Exactly right, so

Marxism as a predictive theory seemed like it's off on every major question.

And the labor theory of value, to put it a little more bluntly and

less politely than you did, is clap-trap, it doesn't work.

It's basically just a theory that's full of analytical holes.

And so people didn't take Marxism very seriously either.

And when they looked across to what was unfolding in the Soviet Union,

it was scarcely grounds for encouragement.

Then the social contract we've just seen as well was thought to be hopeless

because there never was a social contract.

So it seemed like a misleading metaphor at some level.

And anyway, nobody could agree on what the basis for it would be,

given that natural law didn't command any kind of assent.

And, indeed, in 1956, a political philosopher at Cambridge,

by the name of Peter Laslett.

Published a little anthology of papers of what he thought were the best papers

written by political philosophers in the last previous couple of decades.

And in the preface to that, in the introduction to that

Philosophy In Politics And Society volume, he said political philosophy is dead.

>> That God is dead.

[LAUGH] >> Yeah, and

if we had asked him to unpack it, he would have reached for these three doctrines and

said, These are the problems with them And so, the enterprise is basically over.

And so, what this meant was that had you taken a course in political philosophy

in the 1960's, what you would've found is that it basically consisted of two things.

One is a kind of antiquarian history of ideas,

just learning the history of ideas for their own sake.

Not for understanding contemporary issues and problems, right?

That's one thing you would've learned.

The other thing is you would have found people teaching courses about

what I call meta-analysis.

So there would be a lot of conceptual analysis of

what does the term freedom mean?

What does the term equality mean?

But they would end up being theorizing about, what would be a free society, or

what would be an egalitarian society.

So most political philosophy was really

concerned with some combination of those things, history of ideas for

its own sake and meta-analysis.

Not political philosophy in the spirit of the grand transition.

Not anybody trying to do what Hobbes had done or

trying to do what Bentham had done or trying to do what Mill had done.

And Rawls was unlikely, in the sense, also,

that it was considered, in academic philosophy departments

in the Anglo-American speaking world, to be kind of a backwater.

It wasn't where the hot action was.

The hot action was in people doing philosophy of language, epistemology,

metaphysics, logic, just about anything except political philosophy.

So I think that if I had come along and said, say in 1965.

If I'd come along and said, the most important philosopher for the second half

of the 20th century, across all fields, is going to be a political philosopher.

I would've been laughed out of the room.

It just, nobody thought it was what smart people did.

Right.

And, in fact, Rawls turned out to be the most important philosopher

in the second half of the 20th century in the English-speaking world.

Maybe even in the whole world.

If you go by citations, if you go by influence, if you go by

any reasonable measure you want to come up with.

So for instance, if I today went around to the top hundred

philosophy departments in the world and said name the top three

philosophers regardless of specialty from the 20th century.

Rawls would get more votes than anybody else by a huge margin.

So that's interesting, it's a puzzle, right, he was this unlikely figure in

that he revived political philosophy in the spirit of the grand tradition.

And he became the dominant figure in philosophy in

the English-speaking world during his lifetime.

So, really quite astonishing renaissance of political philosophy this has gone on.

And, it's very hard to exaggerate that.

So today every major political science department,

every major philosophy department has courses in political philosophy.

Virtually all of them give central place to John Rawls' work.

And even in the sense that people who don't like his work all,

one way or another, it's a point of reference.

It's out there.

Even if you don't agree with any of it, you cannot ignore it.

It's become that important.

If you go to the library, for instance, and you look at,

if they still allow people into libraries into the stacks in this internet age.

You would find next to John Rawls' book on the shelf in the stacks,

you would find an entire book which just lists

law opinion citations to Rawls' work.

So its influence is been huge inside the Academy and

out and we could speculate about why and

maybe we'll come back to that when we have a better sense of what he had to say.

But he's the single most important political philosopher of our lifetime and

we have to come to grips with that.

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